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H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jun 19, 2008 05:15 PM UTC:
'I regard this to be a very big weakness,  ...'

It is not that bad, if you realize that there is a different mechanism in WB protocol to achieve the same thing: by sending a move to the engine, you implicitly ask the engine if this move is valid. If it isn't, the engine ignores it, and sends an 'Illegal move' message to the GUI. The GUI then undoes the move on the display, and relays the illegal-move message to the user, or engine opponent. As most engines are not considering the possibility that their moves might be illegal, the game then usally hangs, however. But the GUI doesn't have to know about the rules in this case.

There is a big advantage of having the GUI understand the game, though, when you cannot rely 100% on the engines. Then the GUI itself can judge the legality of the moves sent to it, make the engine that does the illegal move forfeit (you don't want to give engines the power to make their opponent forfeit...), and forfeit engines that do make false illegal-move claims. And in WinBoard_F this functionality can be switched on optionally in many variants. The other variants can still be played, with legality checking off.

| if there is only ONE castling move possible at all, it will be 
| matched by ANY string starting with 'O'. 

Why would you want that? It still would not help to understand all games of variants that interchange the O-O and O-O-O notation.

I am not sure why you would want to allow translation in PGN, but not in FEN. In WinBoard I added the external option (/pieceToCharTable) to alter the piece indicators. These would then be used consistently in both FEN and PGN, without any internal tags. The most common case where this is needed is for reading PGN files from a different language. The problem with the tags you propose, is that they still would have to single out one language as 'standard', and other languages will never agree with that. So I think it is better to make that specification external. After experience with some less-known variants (e.g. Knightmate) I realized that this translation should be independently settable for the external interface (saving and loading FEN and PGN), and each engine. This to play engines using different 'standards' against each other. It might even be desirable to have a separate translation table for external reading and writing, so that the GUI could be used to convert PGN files in one language to another one.

I don't think the J-system you use for Janus Chess is acceptable: it only works for opening positions. It should be possible to play from arbitrary positions specified by FEN. And you have no way to indicate that Pawns cannot promote to C in positions where there is no A/Janus on the board. The only logical solution would be to use the J for Janus Pawns, different from Capablanca Pawns by not being able to promote to C. But for Chancellor-Chess positions without a Chancellor, you would then need yet another letter for 'Chancellor Pawns'. And this is what I don't like at all. In Seirawan Chess you would need Capablanca Pawns on an 8x8 board, different from normal Pawns, so you would also need different indicators for Pawns in normal and Capablanca. Or use different letters for Capablanca Pawns on 8x8 and 10x8 boards, to preserve compatibility with existing 10x8 FENs. It quickly prolifirates, and becomes very awkward... Much better to just consider them different variants.

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